Take your seats. Thank you. Cspan3 live today. Just waiting for the American Public Transportation Association conference to begin. Theyre in washington d. C. For their annual legislative summit. Take a look at some of the work recently in the house on transportation. Cq role call reporting recently on the first transportation bill of the new congress. They worked on that last week. The Passenger Rail reform and investment act approved by Committee Last month by unanimous vote and the Congressional Budget Office saying the bill would authorize 7. 2 billion in spending from 2017 to 2020 the biggest grant to amtrak. Were live in the american Transportation Associations conference. Had a great, great session already this morning, 7 30 this morning. Who was all in there eating breakfast . All right. All right. Listen, welcome to aptas 40th annual legislative conference and to our nations capitol. Yesterday was some great sessions, werent they with the mayor of washington d. C. And various
Of the sanctions it was a cig nif event for the United States as well. I would be happy to entertain questions on that when we get into it. So, theres been an awful lot of listening thats gone on. And what i would say is its broken down into a couple of themes. The first theme being this theme of balance finding the sweet spot. As ive said ive spoken to an awful lot of groups similar to this diverse groups, brookings tends to have a very balanced view of things more centrist so perhaps this program resonates. Weve tried to make it a balanced program, to try to reflect all the needs that are going on up there. But the second comment that i get most constantly when i brief this to groups, to the press and in particular to the other seven countries is almost the Immediate Response is wow. Thats rather ambitious. And it is. I will lay claim to our United States program probably being the most forward leaning, most Ambitious Program thats ever been proposed during a chairmanship of the Arct
In the United States, the United States government does not own industries. Now, some of the industries that are represented within the aec from other countries are at least partially or wholly owned by if state. Theres a state interest in having those countries in there to be able to develop things within the arctic. We took a different approach. First of all, because of our culture, once again, our government does not own industries. Secondly, if we start getting too close with industry, you start running into federal Advisory Committee rules that have to be complied with. So our choice, whether you like it or dont like it, our choice early on was to turn this over to the chamber of commerce in alaska. And the chamber of commerce selected three alaskan companies to be our representatives to the aec. And the aec has only just had its first meeting. So i think there are going to be some disputes on how the aec should be used. There will be questions about how we employ it. There will b
The other thing that weve started doing is we call it moral monday iowa. And i believe it started in one of the carolinas. By right. With the naacp. But we just stole the idea. So every monday at noon before we gavel in at 1 00, we have a gathering that draws a lot of press and a lot of advocates, and we talk about an issue that were not getting any legs on. So weve had moral monday iowas on date rape. Weve had moral monday iowas on disparities in education and prisons. Weve had moral monday iowa on education spending, and next week were having it on womens health. We get these huge crowds. We picked a small room, so thats kind of cool because the huge crowds look really big. But i think we want to reclaim the moral and the freedom issues, because we believe that were the ones who work for those, and i think anybody could do some of those things. We get a lot of press coverage for it. Thank you. Senator winfield from connecticut. I wanted to go back to the point about how we talk about
The number of people who turned 65 a day, and will for the next ten years, if you havent googled it, google it it will blow your mind how many of us there are. And im one of those. And they tell me all the time, we want transit because we want to age. Were not going to drive for much longer. Hopefully they will but many of them wont. They want to be able to take transit but they want to be technical savvy. They want to pull up the next bus locator and see when the bus comes. Texas is hot. Fort worth is 110 in july and august. And you dont want to stand on the corner looking for your bus. You want to be able to be in your office or in your home and say, oh, here it comes all i got to do is walk down the street and catch it. And were beginning to get there. The federal government has helped with some of that. But its also got to be a ride that appeals to people. Theyve got to be able to put their bicycle on the front, which they currently cant, hop on the bus, go to work, take their bike